Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020. I am gonna try to very briefly summarize …
Category Archives: Reference Rants
CYORA: Spicy Rock Shipping
Because people were missing the CYORAs and something popped into my head, you got the first one in quite a while. Moving radioactive rocks around is important because it lets us revisit one of my favorite topics: Regulations vs. Reality vs. What Actually Happens [The twenty-second in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for …
CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Terror Money
There’s a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place? You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money. [The twenty-first in an ongoing …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Rad Presents
I think he best way to start this is by shaking my ANGRYFIST at Amazon & eBay for being the gray/black markets of choice for all manner of things that should not be there. Bullshit Lasers only scratch the surface of their almost complete lack of policy enforcement. [The twentieth in an ongoing series of …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Anti-Drone Radiation
I’m very proud of all of you for identifying that these are all TERRIBLE IDEAS. The thing about terrible ideas is that they still occur to people and sometimes staggering amounts of money will be spent to try to make them real and marginally less terrible. Explainer time! [The nineteenth in an ongoing series of …
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Coins of Transition: Revolutions & Civil War
[Editorial Note: This post has sat incomplete for almost three years because I was trying to stitch together some very big and complicated concepts spanning roughly 2600 years. Coming back to this and trying to figure out what I wanted to say, I figured out that the real uniting theme and thesis is {Marge Simpson …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Mailing Cheney’s Heart
With the exception of the old Pu-238 pacemaker, as hospitals & mortuaries prefer FedEx for some reason, all of these things have been sent through the mail by the USPS. Whether they should have is the issue. If the postal inspectors had checked, they’d be cranky. [The eighteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Radioactive Kitty
The fun thing about this one is that I know a lot of people out there have treated their cats for hyperthyroidism, but the number of responses from people that’ve experienced radiopharma medical care for humans that I’d call “inadequate, bordering on actionable” is high. [The seventeenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Abort Launch
The first thing to keep in mind with a rocket launch is that you don’t get to do a lot of “aiming” between pressing IGNITION and ABORT. Aiming, AKA mission planning, is what you spent the previous several months/years doing. These seconds/minutes are the shitfuckdammit stage. [The sixteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Legacy Waste
All of these choices technically cause legacy waste to take up less space, even if one is just a bullshit accounting trick. All of them have been tried, all of them have lead to uptakes, but like all of these quizzes my word choice is important. So, let’s define some terms. [The fifteenth in an …
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The Archetypical Injury – My NYE 2020 Benediction
I thought I would make a new end of year CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE, except I realized I kept running face first into “All Of The Above”. So instead, I want to discuss archetypical accidents to try to encourage you to not be the cause/victim in one. As we approach NYE 2020 with restrictions …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – Old Tubes
I should preface that my primary vacuum tube experience is related to trying to fix the 1920s built-in wall radio made of redwood in a house my family rented when I was in elementary school. Readers, I never fixed that radio. [The fourteenth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers for my CHOOSE YOUR …
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CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE – The NYC Reactor Problem
When I put these polls up, one of the most common responses is “Why on Earth would anyone ask *me* to do this?” That’s fair, but this is my game. ;) But for reactor siting? The number of different fields we talk to is astounding, lest we miss something. You never know when you might …
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Important Research Wisdom
No BBotE and shipping talk today. When people ask how I got into safety work or how to improve the safety culture in their research labs (industry is much easier to fix), I like to share this wisdom from my undergraduate advisor: “Working safely is not just something you do in addition to your research …
CHOOSE YOUR OWN RADIATION ADVENTURE: Radioactive Dead
To reiterate, the good news here is zero chance of zombies. The bad news is that you have to cope with the living instead. Unlike the shambling dead, who are fairly goal oriented (re: your brains), the living have Opinions™ and they are often contradictory. [The twelfth in an ongoing series of my compiled explainers …
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